Explore your Issues under my Tissues

Confronting Gendered Dualistic Concepts: Feminism and Technology

Ng Lay Sion

Have you ever wondered what makes you human? Is it the mind or the body that makes us human? These questions are related to the Christian dualism of spirit/flesh. This mind/body dualism encourages a hierarchal structure in which the mind is given the dominant position and the body comes second. Moreover, Elizabeth Grosz claims that this mind/body dualism is deeply tied to masculine and feminine subject positions, in which the mind is associated with reason, culture, public, self, subjectivity and masculinity while the body is linked to emotion, nature, privacy, other, objectivity and femininity (Grosz 4). It is suggested that this dual and hierarchical nature of oppositional thinking comes to sustain phallogocentrism—the privileging of the phallic signifier, more specifically, the male oriented values, in language and culture (Cixous 91). That is to say, the mind/body dualistic concept, the Enlightenment values of reason in the construction of the human is, indeed, gender biased.